Saint Croix
— — a Danish town the Caribbean kept.
Not only on a wall.
“Twenty-eight miles long in the eastern Caribbean, with two old port towns at either end and cane-country roads between. Christiansted on the north shore keeps its yellow Danish customs houses and Fort Christiansvaern almost unchanged from the eighteenth century. Frederiksted on the west sits behind a long pier where the deep-water cruise ships tie up. Off the north shore, Buck Island Reef is a national monument with a marked snorkel trail through staghorn coral. The trade wind blows almost every day from the east. from the studio
Saint Croix, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Saint Croix is the largest of the United States Virgin Islands, lying about sixty kilometres south of Saint Thomas in the eastern Caribbean. The island stretches roughly 45 kilometres east to west and covers about 215 square kilometres, with a population near 41,000. Its highest point is Mount Eagle, at 1,165 feet. Christopher Columbus made European landfall here in 1493, and the island passed through Spanish, Dutch, English, and French hands before becoming a Danish sugar colony in 1733. The United States purchased the Danish West Indies in 1917 for 25 million dollars in gold. Christiansted is the historic capital and Frederiksted the second port.
Both port towns carry their Danish colonial architecture in the open. Christiansted National Historic Site preserves Fort Christiansvaern, completed in 1749 from Danish yellow brick used as ballast in the cane ships, along with the Steeple Building, the Customs House, and the Scale House on the waterfront. Frederiksted's smaller Fort Frederik, finished in 1760, is the place where Governor-General Peter von Scholten declared emancipation of the enslaved on 3 July 1848, after an uprising led by Moses Gottlieb that began outside the fort the night before. Both forts remain open to visitors under the care of the National Park Service.
Buck Island Reef National Monument lies about 2.5 kilometres off the north shore of Saint Croix, established by President Kennedy in 1961 and expanded by President Clinton in 2001 to cover 19,015 acres of reef and seagrass. A marked underwater snorkel trail runs through stands of elkhorn coral on the back reef, and the inner lagoon is shallow enough to read the coral heads from the surface. Concessioner boats run a half-day or full-day trip out of Christiansted, including a stop at the leeward beach. The trade wind from the east keeps the water clearer on the lee side most of the year.